Social (In)justice Quotes

“Critical Social Justice texts—which form a kind of Gospel of Critical Social Justice—express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress without even a single person with racist or sexist intentions, sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories

“The postmodern approach to social critique is to make their ideas intangible, because then they’re unfalsifiable—that is, they can’t be disproved. Due to postmodernism’s rejection of objective truth and reason, it can’t be argued with. The postmodern perception, Lyotard writes, makes no claim to be true: “Our hypothesis … should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to the question raised.” Postmodern Theory seeks to be strategically useful in bringing about its own aims, not factually true about reality.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories

“All knowledge is constructed: what’s interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way.” What is true and how we know it is true is less interesting to them than finding out who it benefits to say something is “true.” Postmodernism sees knowledge as intrinsically political.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories

“Postmodern Theory and liberalism don’t exist alongside each other. In fact, they are almost directly at odds. Unlike postmodern Theory, liberalism sees knowledge as something we can learn about reality, more or less objectively. It embraces accurate categorization and clarity. It values the individual and universal human values. Although left-leaning liberals tend to favor the underdog, liberalism across the board centers human dignity over victimhood. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate and accepts the correspondence theory of truth—that a statement is true if it accurately describes reality. Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and makes changes based on that criticism.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories

“As intersectionality developed and became dominant in both mainstream political activism and scholarship, it became more common to hear that “straight, white, cisgendered men” are the problem. This is unlikely to make the left appeal to heterosexual white men—especially if they have experienced poverty, homelessness, or other major hardships.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories

“One more casualty of the “increasingly sophisticated” intersectional model is the neglect of the most materially relevant variable in many of the problems faced by women (and by many racial and sexual minorities): economic class. This neglect has gravely concerned left-leaning liberal feminists, socialist feminists, and socialists more broadly.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories

“postcolonial Theory and the way it disparages science and reason threaten the foundations of advanced contemporary societies and slows the progress of developing ones.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories

“When a political stance is taught at university, it’s likely to become an orthodoxy that can’t be questioned.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories